Subject: bug#21391: 24.5; `thing-at-point' returns error when called with arguments 'number t)

From: Drew Adams <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2016 12:27:23 -0700 (PDT)

> > Tino is right.  The mistake behind the handling of optional arg
> > NO-PROPERTIES (which was added in Emacs 24.4) is to assume that
> > `thing-at-point' returns a string.  This is a common
> > misconception.  It can return anything that Emacs Lisp can
> > return.
> 
> Is there a need to pick symbols from a buffer as symbols?
> Don't know. My use-case is editing and strings are the suitable
> format.

Of course there is.  And not just symbols, but numbers, lists...

People too often misunderstand thing-at-point as being only
something to grab text at point to serve as a default value
for reading input.  There are any number of reasons to determine
whether there is a thing of a given type at point, and to
retrieve it if so.